The First of July(102)

He entered the dark hall, avoiding clods of ceiling plaster and broken boards, and passed into what must once have been the kitchen. The range was full of debris: straw and mummified starlings and broken glass. There were empty tin cans on the floor and a stained horsehair mattress with a single battered metal bowl beside it. A solid-looking table top lay on its side by the low window. He was reassured by the dust that no one had been there recently. The shelves were empty, some shards of earthenware pots scattered on the flagstones. At some point, someone had lit a fire in the center of the room. He was not the first person who had sheltered here.

He went through into the back room. It was empty but for a truckle cot, a filthy blanket, and some rags. He decided that if he could find clean water, he would rest there. The stairs looked safe although damaged, and he climbed them, thinking that he might get a view of his surroundings, might even see Corbie from an upstairs window. When he reached the landing, he understood why the departed occupant had had a bed downstairs. Clearly the house had been hit by a stray shell that had taken off the upper rear of the building, or possibly it had been destroyed deliberately to act as a lookout post or a gun emplacement. He had seen cottages used that way on the Marne, the villagers weeping as their homes and their lives were torn apart. Perhaps a thousand meters away, there might be a road with vehicles and horses and gun carriages moving unevenly up to the front line and, shuffling the other way, wounded men.

Then he turned around. Scraps of floral wallpaper hung from the walls, and a prim iron fireplace was all that was left of a chimney, bar some sooty brickwork. There was a smashed washbowl on the floor, decorated with forget-me-nots. Extraordinarily, he could stand among these fragments of domesticity, remember the soft lips and the delicacy of young Madame Godet, and think that she had slept up here, once, right here, with her hair loose, sharing a bed with her pale, pompous husband. Yet just a few kilometers away, he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a continuing attack, and he shivered. He slid down the wall to the floor. Maybe he could stay here. Maybe he could wait out the war. A month, a year: however long it took. He could fish by night, catch eels and snare rabbits. He could eat sorrel and blueberries and apples. He could lie curled up in the corner, centimeters from where she had lain; he would watch the wallpaper roses by day, the stars by night, and go downstairs only when it rained.

He can see himself from above: a speck on a map. There he is; around him, like armor, is Godet’s house. This is in clear focus. Beside that, the river, then Corbie; to either side, the waterlands. He pulls back: there is Amiens. Around the edges of his map, the detail gets hazy: somewhere east, tiny figures fighting; somewhere west, lines of breakers rolling.

A single large explosion. This one was closer at hand: loud enough for him to put out a hand to brace himself instinctively against a wall, and for dust and plaster to float down from the broken brickwork. He could see the road that had been hit. A plume of smoke rose upward. All traffic in either direction had stopped. Tiny figures were spreading out into the fields, and a lone horse galloped wildly away from the damage. He walked into a smaller bedroom, keeping to the shelter of the wall. This room, although also roofless, was less damaged than the one he’d just left, and it faced south. The window frame was still in place, though missing all its glass, and he stood beside it, listening. He could hear the sound of an approaching barge, coming downstream. He saw the red cross on its roof and then the stretchers. It was low in the water, moving slowly, the foredeck crammed with wounded men. Some covered, some half naked, they made a dismal sight, as if the vessel’s freight were corpses.

He was so focused on the boat that, when it had passed, it was a shock to see that in midstream, to his left, was a long, thin island, some willows and long grass still growing upon it, and just visible on the far side another small farmstead and beyond it, unmistakably, the rooftops of Corbie. It overwhelmed him: he felt a tightness in his chest, and he squeezed shut his stinging eyes while the world around him reeled. For a second, he didn’t dare open them—was Corbie just ruins? Had his imagination seen what it once had known, not what was there now? But when he looked again, the stone mass of Corbie’s ancient abbey, and the gray and red roofs, were still there.

He walked down the stairs, keeping to the wall, then through the kitchen and on out into the yard. When he saw the man standing just a few meters away, leaning against the farther arch, he jumped back. The man was facing the river and seemed to be armed with something that Jean-Baptiste could not at first identify but feared was a flame-thrower; various bits of metalwork were visible on either side of him. From the back he looked like a strange sort of insect. He wore the uniform of a British corporal. Jean-Baptiste straightened his muddy cotton jacket. He called out, not wanting to surprise an armed serviceman, even one of France’s allies. He had heard of deserters shooting civilians on their own side.